Mercury expects the increasingly heterogeneous nature of enterprise-based, Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) will create a need for its services, as organizations struggle to understand and optimize sprawling application infrastructures.
Microsoft plans to next year launch Visual Studio 2005 Team System (VSTS), delivering application modeling, management of development teams, and testing capabilities, which the company has, for so-long, left to the likes of more experienced ALM tools providers.
It is widely expected Microsoft, though, will shake-up the ALM market, using a combination of easy-to-use features and pricing that force incumbents and even partners to search for new opportunities. Microsoft’s goal is for ALM mass market, and it will be assisted by desktop ubiquity and the vast Developer Network (MSDN) that has a history of making its tools easy for developers to access.
Microsoft this week came a step closed to delivering on VSTS, launching early code for a planned Software Development Kit (SDK) enabling ISVs to custom build their own application development and modeling tools tailored to specific domains, like healthcare or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). VSTS is planned along with Visual Studio 2005 for the first half of next year.
Christopher Lochhead, Mercury’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO, sees to threat to Mercury – a longstanding Microsoft partner – in the company’s own area of expertise. In fact Lochhead sees quite the reverse – opportunity, as architectures become more complex and more demanding, with the shift to domain-based modeling and development envisioned through VSTS.
During a recent interview, Lochhead told ComputerWire: Microsoft can do a lot of things to make their development experience better, with VBA and .NET, but when you have to put all that better, you need a vendor who is in a good position and who is good at putting all that stuff together.
Microsoft doesn’t have any core competence in making their technology work in these complex, rapidly changing heterogeneous environments. We have 15 years of knowledge, Lochhead claimed.
Mercury justifies its case, pointing to analyst research claiming the average global 2000 customers experiences 30,000 changes each day to their product environment while the average ERP system is integrated to 500 systems, creating potential for code conflicts, bottlenecks and performance issues.
Mercury arguably has a head start in dealing with these complexities, by providing a portfolio already optimization for specific domains, such as SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle and – more recently – Siebel Systems.
Microsoft is not the first to dictate change – IBM made a move with Rational, SAP made a move, there’s Oracle and PeopleSoft, Lochhead said. There’s a lot movement that will effect the layout of IT, but the main topic is to get to a world where they can deploy better and faster.
